THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

PLATO 17
This, of course, is the doctrine which our own day more or less correctly
associates with the name of Nietzsche. "Verily I laughed many a
time over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had
lame paws." 11 Stirner expressed the idea briefly when he said that "a
handful of might is better than a bagful of right." Perhaps nowhere in
the history of philosophy is the doctrine better formulated than by Plato
himself in another dialogue, Gorgias, (483 f), where the Sophist Gallicles
denounces morality as an invention of the weak to neutralize the strength
of the strong.
They distribute praise and censure with a view to their own interests;
they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust meaning by dishonesty the
desire to have more than their neighbors; for knowing their own inferiority,
they would be only too glad to have equality. . . . But if there were a man
who had sufficient force (enter the Superman), he would shake off and
break through and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our
formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws, that sin against nature.
... He who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the utter-
most; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage
and intelligence to minister to them, and to satisfy all his longings. And this
I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. But the many cannot do this;
and therefore they blame such persons, because they are ashamed of their
own inability, which they desire to conceal; and hence they call intemperance
base. . . . They enslave the nobler natures, and they praise justice
only because they are cowards.
This justice is a morality not for men but for foot-men (oude gar andros
all' andrapodou tinos) it is a ; slave-morality, not a hero-morality; the
real virtues of a man are courage (andreia) and 12
.
intelligence (phronesis]
Perhaps this hard "immoralism" reflects the development of imperialism
in the foreign policy of Athens, and its ruthless treatment of weaker
states. 13 "Your empire," said Pericles in the oration which Thucydides
invents for him, "is based on your own strength rather than the good will
of your subjects." And the same historian reports the Athenian envoys
coercing Melos into joining Athens in the war against Sparta: "You
know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question
for equals in power; the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer
what they must." 14 We have here the fundamental problem of ethics,
the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? shall we seek
righteousness, or shall we seek power? is it better to be good,
or to be
strong?
How does Socrates i. e., Plato meet the challenge of this theory? At
u Thus Spake Zarathustra, New York, 1906, p. 166.
^Gorgias 491; cf. Machiavelli's definition of virtb as intellect plus force.
""Barker, p. 73.
u Historv of the Peloponnesian War, v. 105.